It had been five years, three months, and two days since Marina disappeared from my life. I never liked calling it her “death,” even though logic insisted otherwise. To me, she hadn’t died. She had vanished—leaving behind an empty side of the bed and a silence so loud it echoed through every room of the house we had built with so much hope.
They said it was a car accident. Marina had been traveling to visit her family in a coastal village six hours away. The police report was brief. The coffin arrived sealed, supposedly because the impact had been too severe. The funeral passed like a fog—faces blurred by grief, arms wrapping around me while I felt absolutely nothing.
The clearest memory I had from that day was Doña Clara—small, fragile, shaking—clinging to me as though I were the last thing keeping her upright.
In the middle of all that shared devastation, I made a promise.
Marina had always worried about her mother. A widow. A small pension. Failing health.
“If anything ever happens to me,” she once said half-jokingly, “please don’t let her struggle.”
Standing by the grave, the dirt still fresh, I swore to Doña Clara that she never would.
“I’ll take care of you,” I told her, my own hands trembling as I wiped her tears. “Every month. For food, for medicine. It’s what Marina would have wanted.”
She nodded, grateful and broken, and returned to her village.
